To My Future Lover
after A. de Saint-Exupéry
Was I dishevelled in a mirage
where desire, unkindled limit
was a kiss that didn't matter
in the night ocean of those days
was I fearsome as a pilot waking
to a smoke and a slow brandy
delinquent of my own concerns
(every animal and its own smell)
and it never mattered love was
shadows or the sun did not light
each caress or that time would not
search for the fine wreckage?
© 2012 Rob Schackne
after A. de Saint-Exupéry
Was I dishevelled in a mirage
where desire, unkindled limit
was a kiss that didn't matter
in the night ocean of those days
was I fearsome as a pilot waking
to a smoke and a slow brandy
delinquent of my own concerns
(every animal and its own smell)
and it never mattered love was
shadows or the sun did not light
each caress or that time would not
search for the fine wreckage?
© 2012 Rob Schackne
Reading a novel called "Bright And Distant Shores" featuring sailing adventures around arched archipelagos in the Western Pacific. A few lines which reminded me of the pilot's meanderings in your poem:
ReplyDelete"Introspection was unavoidable at sea. The immense sightlines had a way of turning a man inwards. Up in the rigging, Owen watched a progression of coral atolls and saw his life in outline, a lineage of bare rocks that stood for future events - marriage, children, even his own death reckoned in the crags that dotted then diminished above the ocean."
Undoubtedly your poem uses the metaphor of the ocean and the wreckage of a lovelorn relationship to cast its net upon the reader, but I thought that similar musings might come upon one stuck in reverie upon a painted ocean.
Once more: "Somehow, the sea offered a reprieve from the turning wheel. he could see the workings of his life more clearly, felt a fondness for it that he seldom felt ashore. Time slowed and the days were graspable things, bright objects waiting to be taken up."
Flotsam and jetsam ?
Avast : Greg